Follow the money - that's what the legendry whistleblower
"Deep Throat" advised the reporters who revealed the Watergate
scandal. And that's what Business Daily has been doing. The self-styled most
notorious lobbyist in Washington reveals how America's 3 billion dollar political lobbying industry uses hard cash to buy
influence.

Top executives from global megabanks are
usually very careful about how they defend both the continued existence, at
current scale, of their organizations and the implicit subsidies they receive… This
pattern has shifted in recent weeks, with moves on at least three fronts.

The delay is limited yet significant. Wall
Street now has until Jan. 1, instead of October as initially planned, to adopt
a battery of standards. The move grants the financial industry additional time
to comply with rules that, for example, will require firms to verify that their
trading partners meet certain “eligibility standards” and to confirm that they
recommend trading strategies “in the best interests” of their clients.

Bankers can generally be expected to resist or
react negatively to regulations. When confronted with 2,300 pages of new law —
the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — and the
prospect of thousands more pages of regulatory rules, compounded by parallel
actions in international jurisdictions, industry executives predictably went ballistic.

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney
and Bain Capital – Rolling
Stone

How the GOP presidential candidate and his
private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck
others with the bill

The financial crisis and subsequent Euro
problems show that we are paying vast sums for a system that, as Joseph
Stiglitz, former chief economist of the IMF, points out, doesn’t allocate
capital where needed, causing capital flows that are pro-cyclic, exacerbating
peaks and lows of business cycles.

Finance is in need of a technological
revolution – Andrew
Lo / FTFinancial technology can facilitate
tremendous growth. History shows that, when used irresponsibly, it can also
lead to great devastation. Let us hope that the new financial system will be more
Moore and less Murphy.

Alan Greenspan becoming confused about America’s exceptional growth in the 1990s… Greenspan, confounded by the
disconnect, concluded that some sort of missing variable must have been
responsible for the mismatch.

It questions the assumption, nearly universal
since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a
continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth
before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue
indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the
past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.

Gordon's paper is about the biggest and most
important economic question of all: Long-run growth. It's easy to forget that
per-capita income, the overall standard of living, only started to increase
steadily in about 1750.

Summertime blues: The slowdown is spreading
around the world – The Economist

Democracies and debt: Voters are now facing a
harsh truth – The Economist

We need to push on both the monetary and fiscal
policy fronts. Neither policy alone will be sufficient to get the job done
(even without the political hurdles standing in the way), and it's far past the
time for both Congress and the Fed to do more about our crisis level
unemployment problem.

Ultra Easy Monetary Policy and the Law of
Unintended Consequences – FED
(pdf)

Financial crisis: the printing press has
reached its limits
– The
Telegraph

Central bankers may have averted outright
disaster, but they are powerless to do more

This paper documents the characteristics of
housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of
house price movements. Empirical analysis shows that house price dynamics are
mostly driven by income and demographics but fluctuations in these fundamentals
and credit conditions can create deviations from the implied equilibrium path.
We conclude with a discussion of the macroeconomic implications of house price
corrections.